Alma Flor Ada

Participatory Research: Paulo Freire and Alma Flor Ada DVD

DVD fea­tur­ing Alma Flor Ada

Par­tic­i­pa­tory Research is a method­ol­ogy respond­ing to the prin­ci­ples of Lib­er­a­tion and Transformation.

The foun­da­tion of Par­tic­i­pa­tory Research is the acknowl­edge­ment that all human beings are capa­ble of knowl­edge. It chal­lenges the belief that research should be con­ducted only by spe­cial­ists and rec­og­nizes that research is, and should be, part of everyone’s life.

In con­trast with most tra­di­tional research, which stud­ies indi­vid­u­als and their cir­cum­stances as if they were objects, in Par­tic­i­pa­tory Research, the indi­vid­u­als are rec­og­nized as those own­ing the knowl­edge of their own reality.

By engag­ing in crit­i­cal dia­logue, both researcher and par­tic­i­pants raise their lev­els of aware­ness and con­scious­ness. In sol­i­dar­ity they reflect on the causes of exist­ing real­i­ties and search for alter­na­tives to unjust, unequal, or oppres­sive conditions.

In this dia­logue Paulo Freire and Alma Flor Ada share ideas about Par­tic­i­pa­tory Research as devel­oped based on Paulo’s prin­ci­ples of Crit­i­cal Ped­a­gogy and as car­ried on by Alma Flor’s doc­toral stu­dents at the Uni­ver­sity of San Francisco.